Blood Test: A Comedy by Charles Baxter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Brock Hobson is a mild-mannered insurance broker and Sunday school teacher. He makes an impulse buy of a blood test that will allegedly tell him what the future holds for him based on his DNA, and his questionnaire. It says he will commit a felony. He scoffs, but he suddenly feels empowered to commit a crime. He buys a handgun. Things get more serious after that. His ex-wife Cheryl is shacking up with a musclebound lout who calls Brock and Cheryl’s son a homophobic slur. Violence appears in the offing. That’s about as far as I go into the plot without spoilers, but this really isn’t a plot-heavy book. It’s supposed to be a comedy. Kirkus reviews calls it “riotously funny” which is funnier than anything in the book. Another reviewer calls it wry. I’ll buy wry and add tongue-in-cheek. That’s enough to get three stars, but it was less than riveting and had a lot of filler. It was mildly amusing and filled in some time, so I’m not really complaining.